I once read that a human being on a bicycle is the most efficient means by which any animal has ever moved through space. Indeed, it is a claim often made. Forty years ago Ivan Illich wrote that:
“The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other anima...

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The big boys who meet at the annual World Economic Forum at Davos aren’t really into warm fuzzy ideas. For them, money talks and bullshit walks. So the fact that they started talking about the circular economy at their meeting in January this year was a pretty good indicator that the idea has become mainstream – meaning that it pays. There is talk of it being worth a trillion dollars per annum (1.4% of global GDP) and it is the subject of next month’s Green Week – ‘the biggest annual conference on European environment policy’. So what is this circular economy that they are talking so effusivel...

In the first article in this series a couple of weeks ago, I suggested that the trend towards sustainability in the construction sector was being driven by demand as the business case for green buildings becomes more widely appreciated by investors and tenants.
This week, my aim is to survey the most widely used tools for determining a building’s sustainability in different regions and assess the extent to which there is an international harmonization of these green ratings tools. After all, there are over 600 such systems operating in the world today.
Energy savings inherent in efficien...

Unless you have been living under a rock, or on the wrong side of the digital divide in a slum, you will be aware that last week I introduced the idea of EPDs, or type III environmental declarations, in the construction sector. I asserted that they were a useful and important addition to the armory of measures that currently vie to push human society towards the much vaunted but elusive goal of sustainability. The construction sector is leading other industries internationally in the development of EPD schemes so perhaps offers some sort of template for the wider use of EPDs.
The Internatio...

In recent years humankind reached a significant milestone when we became a predominantly urban species. This trend towards urbanization is part of the transition from agrarian to industrial society that is radically transforming our social metabolism and threatening the earth system. Although Northern Europe established this trend in the 18th century, it is currently most pronounced in the developing world. In China for example, where rural migrants have for decades been flooding urban spaces, construction spending amounted to $1.25 trillion in 2012.
Yet most construction still occurs in ri...

A couple of years ago TIME magazine rated Handprints among the “10 ideas that are changing your life”. This statement would tend to suggest that either your life is pretty stagnant or that maybe it is worth examining what the handprint hype is about. Has it changed our lives?
Handprints are the converse of footprints. Where footprints carry negative connotations – generally about the burdens that humans place on “the environment” – handprints exude positivity. Take for example the narrative of the Positive Handprints Foundation. It assures us that handprints are all about the five Ps of sus...

‘Development’ might be a fuzzy concept, but it is essentially concerned with fostering conditions that are socially desirable. Despite the interventions of such scholars as Amartya Sen, with his focus on human development, for too long the concepts of ‘development’ and ‘economic growth’ have been used interchangeably – economic growth has remained development’s proxy
Whilst economic growth might be one means to development, it is not the end itself. Industrial ecologist Robert Ayres notes that it simply “reflects increasingly frantic activity, especially trade, but little or no progress in ...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a means of determining the environmental impact of a product, process or activity. It abstracts that “thing” from its surrounds and assesses its material interaction with the ecosystem in terms of particular impacts. Such impacts include climate, water, human health etc.
With the burgeoning awareness in recent years of the unprecedented alterations that humanity is inflicting upon planet earth – especially its thermoregulatory system – demand has grown for LCA based product declarations: product environmental footprinting (PEF). The PEF World Forum defines a ...

We've all heard of the sharing economy. We're all aware of the need for double decoupling. We all know that our resource consumption needs to drop drastically. But still, nothing is less disputed than our enjoyment of more money, be it a raise, a growing business or an increasing GDP. Isn't that contradictory? Well, yes and no. In terms of business strategies, here's how to get to both at the same time.
Yoon-Young Chun and Kun-Mo Lee are the two studious Korean researchers whose findings I would like to introduce in this article. They identified 105 business cases that were influenced early...

SimaPro and GaBi are the most commonly used software tools to conduct a professional life cycle assessment. There is, however, a third solution in this field, one that is capable of not only calculating product life cycles, but also modeling and improving entire production systems. That integrative solution is called Umberto. While Umberto's extensive feature list may have initially confused some practitioners in the past, and the interface was sometimes deemed unintuitively technical, let me convince you in this article that the opposite is the actual case now. Especially since the launch of ...

Right after driving, flying, heating, and cooling, consuming meat and dairy products weighs the most heavily on our lifestyle related climate budget. While it is clear that fossil fuel powered cars, airplanes, heaters and air conditioners have a terrible carbon footprint, what's the deal with cows, really? Is dairy all that bad? Assuming this to be the case, what options are there to replace them? How do soy milk and other alternatives score in their overall environmental impacts compared to traditional milk? In this article, we'll analyze the life cycle of milk and relate it to soy milk, and ...

When the only way to implement a satisfactory future in human development is holistic thinking about sustainability, why is it that we so rarely happen to come across aids for realizing this mindset? Well, it's a good question, but they actually do appear from time to time. An outstanding example every year is practitioners from business and academia coming together at the umberto user workshop to showcase their manifold ways of tackling sustainability and efficiency challenges. In their respective companies and research projects, they each face all sorts of questions concerning their many dif...

Hamburg, Germany's second-largest city, saw more than half its building stock destroyed during world war II. The war is way over, but many buildings still tell of its story. A big building-exhibition now displays dozens of contemporary projects that accept the past and envision a conflict preventing future by retrofitting the built-up war and post-war heritage with climate friendly, energy efficient updates. From the exhibition's pool of 40 buildings and projects only a few of the projects relate directly to WWII history, but all follow one of three themes, the most important being, in my opin...

As I sail through the English Channel and complete my last miles around the world on a reefer vessel, accompanying 5000 tons of kiwifruit on their way from New Zealand to Europe, let me share some thoughts I've had during the past few weeks on the sustainability of this transport mode.
To start with, here are a few answers to the most common questions. Yes, today's cargo ships employ engine technology that emits horrible amounts of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and particulates. However, putting these emissions in perspective with each item transported, ships are more energ...

Last week, I introduced you to the first three steps small and medium-sized companies need to take to increase their resource efficiency to a maximum. Today, you'll find the last two of the five steps involved in making the most use of material flow modeling.
Step 4: Calculate Product Costs Related to Material Loss
Broken down to one product, how much do my materials cost? That's an appropriate question. In addition, material flow cost accounting can determine how much material is “lost” in every single process and every possible material cost. Viere et al.:
From the perspective of resource...